the dazzling west front pasture, “I can’t stand this! I’ll tell that
idiot Osmond-Orme that the deception must come to an end....”
“Why do you walk so fast?” said the voice of Susanna, behind him. “I
have had to _race_ to catch you.”
“I am sorry,” said Wopse, stopping and turning his troubled eyes upon
the fair face of his young relation.
“Let us walk on”—Susanna cast an apprehensive glance behind her—“or
somebody——”
“Somebody will see us walking together!” said Wopse acutely.
“It is so much nicer,” Susanna said demurely, “when one can keep
pleasant things to oneself. And we have had a good many walks and talks
since you came down here, haven’t we? And cliff scrambles—and bicycle
rides—and rows on the river. And the fun of it is that, although we are
such pals, really, father and grandmother and Uncle Alaric believe that
I positively detest you.” Her young laugh rang out gayly; she thrust a
sprig of lavender, perfumed and spicy, under the painter’s nose. He
captured the tantalizing hand.
“Do you not?”
“Detest you! You know I don’t.”
“May I have it?” It was the sprig of lavender. But the painter looked
at, and squeezed, the hand.
“If you promise to make a big score on Thursday!”
Susanna, it must be admitted, was learning coquetry.
“I will—if you are looking at me!”
“Done!”
“Done! Come into the beech avenue,” the painter pleaded, “just for a few
moments, before that little beast follows us. You know he will!”
“He can’t!” Susanna’s golden eyelashes drooped upon crimson cheeks. “He
can’t get down! I—I took away the ladder before I came away!” she owned.
Both hands were imprisoned, her blue eyes lifted, lost themselves in the
brown ones that looked down at her.
“Was that because you wanted—to be alone with me? Was it?” demanded
Wopse.
“Oh, Hal, don’t!”
“I’ll let you go when you have owned up, not before,” Wopse said
sternly.
Susanna’s reply came in a whisper: “You—know—it—was!”
The whisper was so faint that Wopse had to bend quite low to catch it.
Of course he need not have kissed Susanna. But he did, as Alaric
Osmond-Orme and Lord Beaumaris appeared, walking confidentially together
arm-in-arm.
“I think my little stratagem succeeds!” Lord Beaumaris had just said, in
reference to the preference exhibited by his daughter for the society of
the pretended painter. And Alaric had responded:
“Yes, as you say, my plan has proved quite a brilliant success!” when
Lord Beaumaris clutched his cousin’s arm.
“Merciful powers! Susanna and that—that young impostor!”
Alaric’s eyeglass fell with a click, and the diabolical left eye twirled
and twisted fiendishly in its socket as its retina embraced the picture
indicated.
“Feign not to have observed.... Well, Susanna! How are you, Halcyon. We
are strolling towards the ballroom for a glimpse of Wopse’s work.”
“We are stro——” Lord Beaumaris choked and purpled. Alaric dragged him
on.
“Do you think?...” Susanna’s cheeks were white roses now. “Do you
think—they——”
“Saw me kiss you? Not a doubt of it!”
“Oh!” Susanna confronted him with blazing eyes. “You!—you did it on
_purpose_! It was a plot——”
She clenched her strong young hands, battling with the desire to buffet
the handsome bronzed face before her. “I’ll never—never speak to you
again!” she cried.
“You will not be allowed to,” groaned the poor painter. “Our walks and
rides and all the rest are over.... Yes, there has been a plot, but not
of the kind you suspect. I am a traitor—but not the kind of traitor you
think me. Lady Lymston, I am not the Duke of Halcyon. I am a poor
devil—I beg your pardon!—I am a painter; my name is Wopse, and I have
disgraced my profession by the part I have played!” He sat down
miserably on a rustic bench.
“Oh! It has been a put-up thing between you all!” Susanna gasped. “Oh!”
She towered over Wopse like an incensed young goddess.
“If I could only paint you like that! Yes—I deserve that you should hate
me. Never mind who planned the thing, I should have known better than to
soil my hands with a deception,” said Wopse. “As for the Duke——”
“The Duke! Do I understand that that earwig in velveteen is my cousin
Halcyon!” Susanna’s voice was very cold.
“Yes. I am a kind of cousin, too,” said Wopse.
“But not that kind. Those—those designs—the work on the ceiling. They
are really yours?” Susanna asked.
“Mine, of course. Do you think that fellow could have done them?” cried
Wopse, firing up. “I’ve risen at four every morning to work at them,
and——”
“And you ride splendidly, and you’re a crack shot and polo player, and
you’re going to win for the county Eleven on Thursday,” came
breathlessly from Susanna.
“Ah, you won’t care to look at me now!” said the depressed Wopse.
“Won’t I?” Susanna’s eyes were dancing, her cheeks were glowing, she
pirouetted on the moss-grown ground of the avenue and dropped a little
curtsey to the painter. “When doing it will drive father and grandmother
and Alaric and the Earwig wild with rage.... When—when I like doing it,
too! When——” she stooped, and her lips were very near Wopse’s
cheek—“when I love doing it!”
“Oh, Susanna!” cried the painter.
“My dear Halcyon!” said Lord Beaumaris, peering short-sightedly upwards
through a maze of scaffolding. “I think you may as well come down.”
“In other words—the game is up!” said Alaric Osmond-Orme mildly. “Come
down, my dear fellow, and resume your own _rôle_ of hereditary
legislator. Allow me to replace the ladder.” He did so.
“So that fellow’s done me! I guessed as much when that little—when
Susanna took away the ladder,” said the Duke, preparing to descend. “And
then when I saw him kiss her—there’s a remarkably good view of the
gardens through the end window. I——” He pointed to some remarkable
effects of color splashed upon the ground so carefully prepared by the
painter. “I took it out of the beggar in the only way I could, don’t you
know.”
“Take it out of him still more,” suggested Alaric, his tinted eyeglass
concealing a fiendish twinkle, “by playing in the County Cricket Match.
He’s entered in your name, you know!”
“You’re very obligin’,” said the Duke, “but I don’t think I’m taking
any.” He gracefully slithered to the floor as Susanna and Halcyon Wopse
entered the ballroom, radiant and hand in hand.
“Papa,” said Susanna, taking the bull by the horns, “Mr. Wopse and I are
engaged. We mean to be married as soon as possible after the County
Cricket Match.” She kissed the perturbed countenance of Lord Beaumaris,
nodded to the Duke, and walked over to Alaric. “Your plan has succeeded
beautifully,” she said. “Ain’t you pleased—and won’t you congratulate
us?”
“I am delighted,” said the imperturbable Alaric. He dropped his eyeglass
and before the preternatural intelligence of his left eye even Susanna
quailed. “And I congratulate you both most heartily.” He smiled, and
pressed the hands of Susanna and her lover, and, moving away, stepped
into the garden. There, unseen, he rubbed his hands, twinkling with
mourning rings.
“I loved that boy’s mother very dearly, boy as I was then ...” said
Alaric. “As for Susanna, if she knew that I knew she was listening at
the library door....” He replaced his eyeglass, and his expression
became, as usual, a blank.
LADY CLANBEVAN’S BABY
There was a gray, woolly October fog over Hyde Park. The railings wept
grimy tears, and the damp yellow leaves dropped soddenly from the soaked
trees. Pedestrians looked chilled and sulky; camphor chests and
cedar-presses had yielded up their treasures of sables and sealskin,
chinchilla and silver fox. A double stream of fashionable traffic rolled
west and east, and the rich clarets and vivid crimsons of the
automobiles burned through the fog like genial, warming fires.
A Baby-Bunting six horse-power petrol-car, in color a chrysanthemum
yellow, came jiggeting by. The driver stopped. He was a technical
chemist and biologist of note and standing, and I had last heard him
speak from the platform of the Royal Institution.
“I haven’t seen you,” said the Professor, “for years.”
“That must be because you haven’t looked,” said I, “for I have both seen
and heard you quite recently. Only you were upon the platform and I was
on the ground-floor.”
“You are too much upon the ground-floor now,” said the Professor, with a
shudder of a Southern European at the dampness around and under foot,
“and I advise you to accept a seat in my car.”
And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company
of so many highly-varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power
auto-cars, joined the steadily-flowing stream going west.
“I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,” I said, as the thin,
skillful hand in the baggy chamois glove manipulated the driving-wheel,
and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way
between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.
The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap-peak, and his thin,
tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.
“Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it
not? And so I could—and would, if the pure radium chloride were not
three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore
residues about one gramme—that is fifteen grains—can be extracted by
fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric
acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of
hydrogen-sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that
remain—polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth—the chloride of radium.
With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my
friend”—his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly
lustrous—“I could stop the world!”
“And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?” I suggested.
“When I speak of the world,” exclaimed the Professor, “I do not refer to
the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which
inhabits it.”
“Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?” I queried.
The Professor turned upon me with so sudden a verbal _riposte_ that the
Baby-Bunting swerved violently.
“You are not as young as you were when I met you first. To be plain, you
are getting middle-aged. Do you like it?”
“I hate it!” I answered, with beautiful sincerity.
“Would you thank the man who should arrest, not the beneficent passage
of Time, which means progress, but the wear and tear of nerve and
muscle, tissue, and bone, the slow deterioration of the blood by the
microbes of old age, for Metchnikoff has shown that there is no
difference between the atrophy of senility and the atrophy caused by
microbe poison? Would you thank him—the man who should do that for you?
Tell me, my friend.”
I replied, briefly and succinctly: “Wouldn’t I?”
“Ha!” exclaimed the Professor, “I thought so!”
“But I should have liked him to have begun earlier,” I said.
“Twenty-nine is a nice age, now.... It is the age we all try to stop at,
and can’t, however much we try. Look there!”
A landau limousine, dark blue, beautifully varnished, nickel-plated, and
upholstered in cream-white leather, came gliding gracefully through the
press of vehicles. From the crest upon the panel to the sober
workmanlike livery of the chauffeur, the turn-out was perfection. The
pearl it contained was worthy of the setting.
“Look there?” I repeated, as the rose-cheeked, sapphire-eyed, smiling
vision passed, wrapped in a voluminous coat of chinchilla and silver
fox, with a toque of Parma violets under the shimmer of the silken veil
that could only temper the burning glory of her wonderful Renaissance
hair.
“There’s the exception to the rule.... There’s a woman who doesn’t need
the aid of science or of Art to keep her at nine and twenty. There’s a
woman in whom ‘the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue and bone’
goes on—if it does go on—imperceptibly. Her blood doesn’t seem to be
much deteriorated by the microbe of old age, Professor, does it? And
she’s forty-three! The alchemistical forty-three, that turns the gold of
life back into lead! The gold remains gold in her case, for that hair,
that complexion, that figure, are,” I solemnly declared, “her own.”
At that moment Lady Clanbevan gave a smiling gracious nod to the
Professor, and he responded with a cold, grave bow. The glow of her
gorgeous hair, the liquid sapphire of her eyes, were wasted on this
stony man of science. She passed, going home to Stanhope Gate, I
suppose, in which neighborhood she has a house; I had barely a moment to
notice the white-bonneted, blue-cloaked nurse on the front of the
landau, holding a bundle of laces and cashmeres, and to reflect that I
have never yet seen Lady Clanbevan taking the air out of the society of
a baby, when the Professor spoke:
“So Lady Clanbevan is the one woman who has no need of the aid of Art or
science to preserve her beauty and maintain her appearance of youth?
Supposing I could prove to you otherwise, my friend, what then?”
“I should say,” I returned, “that you had proved what everybody else
denies. Even the enemies of that modern Ninon de l’Enclos, who has just
passed——”
“With the nurse and the baby?” interpolated the Professor.
“With the nurse and the baby,” said I. “Even her enemies—and they are
legion—admit the genuineness of the charms they detest. Mentioning the
baby, do you know that for twenty years I have never seen Lady Clanbevan
out without a baby? She must have quite a regiment of children—children
of all ages, sizes, and sexes.”
“Upon the contrary,” said the Professor, “she has only one!”
“The others have all died young, then?” I asked sympathetically, and was
rendered breathless by the rejoinder:
“Lady Clanbevan is a widow.”
“One never asks questions about the husband of a professional beauty,” I
said. “His individuality is merged in hers from the day upon which her
latest photograph assumes a marketable value. Are you sure there isn’t a
Lord Clanbevan alive somewhere?”
“There is a Lord Clanbevan alive,” said the Professor coldly. “You have
just seen him, in his nurse’s arms. He is the only child of his mother,
and she has been a widow for nearly twenty years! You do not credit what
I assert, my friend?”
“How can I, Professor?” I asked, turning to meet his full face, and
noticed that his dark, somewhat opaque brown irises had lights and
gleams of carbuncle-crimson in them. “I have had Lady Clanbevan and her
progeny under my occasional observation for years. The world grows
older, if she doesn’t, and she has invariably a baby—_toujours_ a new
baby—to add to the charming illusion of young motherhood which she
sustains so well. And now you tell me that she is a twenty-years’ widow
with one child, who must be nearly of age—or it isn’t proper. You puzzle
me painfully!”
“Would you care,” asked the Professor after a moment’s pause, “to drive
back to Harley Street with me? I am, as you know, a vegetarian, so I
will not tax your politeness by inviting you to lunch. But I have
something in my laboratory I should wish to show you.”
“Of all things, I should like to come,” I said. “How many times haven’t
I fished fruitlessly for an invitation to visit the famous laboratory
where nearly twenty years ago——”
“I traced,” said the Professor, “the source of phenomena which heralded
the evolution of the Röntgen Ray and the ultimate discovery of the
radio-active salt they have christened radium. I called it protium
twenty years ago, because of its various and protean qualities. Why did
I not push on—perfect the discovery and anticipate Sir William C—— and
the X——’s? There was a reason. You will understand it before you leave
my laboratory.”
The Baby-Bunting stopped at the unfashionable end of Harley Street, in
front of the dingy yellow house with the black front door, flanked by
dusty boxes of mildewed dwarf evergreens, and the Professor, relieved of
his fur-lined coat and cap, led the way upstairs as lightly as a boy.
Two garret-rooms had been knocked together for a laboratory. There was a
tiled furnace at the darker end of the long skylighted room thus made,
and solid wooden tables much stained with spilt chemicals, were covered
with scales, glasses, jars, and retorts—all the tools of chemistry. From
one of the many shelves running round the walls, the Professor took down
a circular glass flask and placed it in my hands. The flask contained a
handful of decayed and moldy-looking wheat, and a number of peculiarly
offensive-looking little beetles with tapir-like proboscides.
“The perfectly developed beetle of the _Calandria granaria_,” said the
Professor, as I cheerfully resigned the flask, “a common British weevil,
whose larvæ feed upon stored grain. Now look at this.” He reached down
and handed me a precisely similar flask, containing another handful of
grain, cleaner and sounder in appearance, and a number of grubs,
sharp-ended chrysalis-like things buried in the grain, inert and
inactive.
“The larvæ of _Calandria granaria_,” said the Professor, in his drawling
monotone. “How long does it take to hatch the beetle from the grub? you
ask. Less than a month. The perfect weevils that I have just shown you I
placed in their flask a little more than three weeks back. The grubs you
see in the flask you are holding, and which, as you will observe by
their anxiety to bury themselves in the grain so as to avoid contact
with the light, are still immature, I placed in the glass receptacle
twenty years ago. Don’t drop the flask—I value it.”
“Professor!” I gasped.
“Twenty years ago,” repeated the Professor, delicately handling the
venerable grubs, “I enclosed these grubs in this flask, with sufficient
grain to fully nourish them and bring them to the perfect state. In
another flask I placed a similar number of grubs in exactly the same
quantity of wheat. Then for twenty-four hours I exposed flask number one
to the rays emanating from what is now called radium. And as the
electrons discharged from radium are obstructed by collision with
air-atoms, I exhausted the air contained in the flask.” He paused.
“Then, when the grubs in flask number two hatched out,” I anticipated,
“and the larvæ in flask number one remained stationary, you realized——”
“I realized that the rays from the salt arrested growth, and at the same
time prolonged to an almost incalculable extent,” said the
Professor—“for you will understand that the grubs in flask number one
had lived as grubs half a dozen times as long as grubs usually do....
And I said to myself that the discovery presented an immense, a
tremendous field for future development. Suppose a young woman of, say,
twenty-nine were enclosed in a glass receptacle of sufficient bulk to
contain her, and exposed for a few hours to my protium rays, she would
retain for many years to come—until she was a great-grandmother of
ninety!—the same charming, youthful appearance——”
“As Lady Clanbevan!” I cried, as the truth rushed upon me and I grasped
the meaning this astonishing man had intended to convey.
“As Lady Clanbevan presents to-day,” said the Professor, “thanks to the
discovery of a——”
“Of a great man,” said I, looking admiringly at the lean worn figure in
the closely-buttoned black frock-coat.
“I loved her.... It was a delight to her to drag a disciple of Science
at her chariot-wheels. People talked of me as a coming man. Perhaps I
was.... But I did not thirst for distinction, honors, fame.... I
thirsted for that woman’s love.... I told her of my discovery—as I told
her everything. Bah!” His lean nostrils worked. “You know the game that
is played when one is in earnest and the other at play. She promised
nothing, she walked delicately among the passions she sowed and fostered
in the souls of men, as a beautiful tigress walks among the
poison-plants of the jungle. She saw that rightly used, or wrongly used,
my great discovery might save her beauty, her angelic, dazzling beauty
that had as yet but felt the first touch of Time. She planned the whole
thing, and when she said, ‘You do not love me if you will not do this,’
I did it. I was mad when I acceded to her wish, perhaps; but she is a
woman to drive men frenzied. You have seen how coldly, how slightingly
she looked at me when we encountered her in the Row? I tell you—you have
guessed already—I went there to see her. I always go where she is to be
encountered, when she is in town. And she bows, always; but her eyes are
those of a stranger. Yet I have had her on her knees to me. She cried
and begged and kissed my hands.”
He knotted his thin hands, their fingers brown-tipped with the stains of
acids, and wrung and twisted them ferociously.
“And so I granted what she asked, carried out the experiment, and paid
what you English call the piper. The giant glass bulb with the
rubber-valve door was blown and finished in France. It involved an
expense of three hundred pounds. The salt I used—of protium (christened
radium now)—cost me all my savings—over two thousand pounds—for I had
been a struggling man——”
“But the experiment?” I broke in. “Good Heavens, Professor! How could a
living being remain for any time in an exhausted receiver? Agony
unspeakable, convulsions, syncope, death! One knows what the result
would be. The merest common sense——”
“The merest common sense is not what one employs to make discoveries or
carry out great experiments,” said the Professor. “I will not disclose
my method; I will only admit to you that the subject—the subjects were
insensible; that I induced _anæsthesia_ by the ordinary ether-pump
apparatus, and that the strength of the ray obtained was concentrated to
such a degree that the exposure was complete in three hours.” He looked
about him haggardly. “The experiment took place here nineteen years
ago—nineteen years ago, and it seems to me as though it were yesterday.”
“And it must seem like yesterday to Lady Clanbevan—whenever she looks in
the glass,” I said. “But you have pricked my curiosity, Professor, by
the use of the plural. Who was the other subject?”
“Is it possible you don’t guess?” The sad, hollow eyes questioned my
face in surprise. Then they turned haggardly away. “My friend, the other
subject associated with Lady Clanbevan in my great experiment was—Her
Baby!”
I could not speak. The dowdy little grubs in the flask became for me
creatures imbued with dreadful potentialities.... The tragedy and the
sublime absurdity of the thing I realized caught at my throat, and my
brain grew dizzy with its horror.
“Oh! Professor!” I gurgled, “how—how grimly, awfully, tragically
ridiculous! To carry about with one wherever one goes a baby that never
grows older—a baby——”
“A baby nearly twenty years old? Yes, it is as you say, ridiculous and
horrible,” the Professor agreed.
“What could have induced the woman!” burst from me.
The Professor smiled bitterly.
“She is greedy of money. It is the only thing she loves—except her
beauty and her power over men; and during the boy’s infancy—that word is
used in the Will—she has full enjoyment of the estate. After he ‘attains
to manhood’—I quote the Will again—hers is but a life-interest. Now you
understand?”
I did understand, and the daring of the woman dazzled me. She had made
the Professor doubly her tool.
“And so,” I gurgled between tears and laughter, “Lord Clanbevan, who
ought to be leaving Eton this year to commence his first Oxford term, is
being carried about in the arms of a nurse, arrayed in the flowing
garments of a six-months’ baby! What an astonishing conspiracy!”
“His mother,” continued the Professor calmly, “allows no one to approach
him but the nurse. The family are only too glad to ignore what they
consider a deplorable case of atavistic growth-arrest, and the boy
himself——” He broke off. “I have detained you,” he said, after a pause.
“I will not do so longer. Nor will I offer you my hand. I am as
conscious as you are—that it has committed a crime.” And he bowed me out
with his hands sternly held behind him. There were few more words
between us, only I remember turning on the threshold of the laboratory,
where I left him, to ask whether protium—radium, as it is now
christened—checks the growth of every organic substance? The answer I
received was curious:
“Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!”